FYI, in conjunction with Perspective API[1], this is the list of words that authors used to determine whether a tweet is considered hateful: https://github.com/dan-hickey1/musk-hate-lexicon/blob/main/h...

1. https://perspectiveapi.com/

This is kind of a short list and very narrow in scope I find?

I would have expected more sophistication

Among the list of hate words in the lexicon (after filtering out words with a cumulative score less than 4) is 'antiwhite'. Why?

Edit: I could see how maybe someone could affiliate the word with hateful speech, but.. seems like a stretch, so I am curious what the rationale is. Maybe I'm missing something

Also, I've only ever seen "honk honk" used to reference "clown world", i.e. that the author thinks something societal or political is ridiculous, should this really be classified as hate speech? If so, makes me wonder whether the push to ban 'hate speech' and label it as extremely hazardous makes sense...

Finding more hate speech makes a more attention getting paper therefore the trend is likely to have higher sensitivity.

>Also, I've only ever seen "honk honk" used to reference "clown world", i.e. that the author thinks something societal or political is ridiculous, should this really be classified as hate speech? If so, makes me wonder whether the push to ban 'hate speech' and label it as extremely hazardous makes sense...

It's odd that you know what "honk honk" and the "clown world" meme without having any idea where they come from[0,1].

[0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Clown_World

[0]https://www.antihate.ca/_honk_honk_antisemitic_meme_before_c...

Seems like maybe it's not actually the "dog whistle" conspiracy the links claim and it's possible people just see it as " the author thinks something societal or political is ridiculous" as the GP mentioned?

Are you implying a Pepe dressed as a clown is "hate speech"...?

Incredible.

This is why half the country doesn't take accusations of "hate" seriously.

Milk is hateful. Coffee is hateful. I'm pretty sure in five minutes someone will tell me waiting for the light to change on alternate thursdays under a full moon while wearing the color green is also hateful. The dysphemistic dreadmill never ends.

This is exactly how dog whistles are supposed to work. People affected understand the real meaning, and out-groups (along with people who read things pedantically and cannot code switch or process nuance) are bewildered by the heightened emotions surrounding the communications.

This particular dog whistle developed right out loud and lots of people still can't get it. It's amazing to see.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clown-pepe-honk-honk-clown-wo...

This one does have a minimal standing usage by non-assholes, but there's not much ROI on differentiating, since "honk honk" isn't actionable or interesting criticism regardless of the political opinions of the speaker.

This is the first actual explanation of a dogwhistle that I've _ever_ seen, and I've seen the word used many times. I think we could be doing a much better job about educating outgroups on the terminology that's created to label behaviors we want to effect.

Apart from that, the actual concept seems slightly tenuous to me. Like, it seems like anyone could say something is a dogwhistle against some group and the only way to disprove it is to have people of said group publicly communicate that they don't associate the negative meaning of it. I assume this basically never happens because if you belong to a group that's told they're effected, you'd probably trust that. It seems that this would easily lead to fake dogwhistle proliferation and make the waters _very_ muddy. You could say this assists in the effecacy of the method.

However, having seen these memes be used all the time in many places and never once observing an actual hateful meme, i question why the average person would be concerned. Not only have i never seen honkler in the context of naziism, I've never seen a jewish person (or anyone up to this point) speaking out against its usage in such non nazi contexts. And the fact that there's so many people in these comments saying they never knew it was associated with naziism really makes me question if any of us should be concerned with its regular usage.

It just seems to me like an in group meme that a bunch of basement dwellers think is gonna convince people nazis are okay, which the average person will literally never see in any nazi context at all, and which a small group of people are very very upset about, seemingly believing the claims of the basement dwellers. Like, it could be literally any image, and the vast majority of people would never know the difference. How many people are actually behind effected by this? (Genuine question)

If i see a racist meme I'll call it out, but I'm going to go back to enjoying the parts of the internet that are capable of utilizing arbitrary images for fun.

4chan is world famous for hoaxing the left by cooperating with their need to find white supremacy everywhere. The black square, the OK sign, pepe, and many other symbols and memes are examples where 4chan inserted the assertion that XYZ is associated with <the bad people> into the left's hive mind.

The intent is to ridicule the left by having dupes get up in front of everyone and claim that a frog is a <the bad people> hate symbol, or that posting a square of black pixels demonstrates solidarity with anti-racism.

OR, that's what they want us to think, and the truth is that systematic countless postings of a frog is the precursor to <the bad people> world domination.

4chan has pulled some truly impressive hoaxes, but they are also adept at creating these dog whistles. /r/frenworld was a master class in riding the line between dog whistle and obvious hate speech. Eventually it got banned and the users just moved to /r/honkler and took a lot of the vocabulary with then.

Regardless of what one might think the "correct interpretation" of the cartoon frog might be, actual real-world unapologetic white supremacists have associated themselves with that specific cartoon frog on national television, so the matter isn't limited to some bored pranksters on an image board.

Various random things become synonymous with hate if there's enough people that reach an understanding that they're used that way. It's in the same area as "are you implying wearing a white sheet is related to hate?" Yes, it became a known enough symbol and it is.

Yes, but this isn't it. The burden of proof is on you.

I don't think there's really a burden of proof as such on anyone. Whether something qualifies or not will be a consensus in a given community, location, timeframe, etc.

There's quite a bit of substance behind the idea that it is problematic. (Already linked) But there will be nuance too.

> There's quite a bit of substance behind the idea that it is problematic. (Already linked)

There isn't substance, it's willful misinterpretation. The joke/hoax/op whatever you want to call it is -right there-. It isn't an attack on a racial or ethnic group, it's an attack on a political identity.

Is attacking liberals now considered "hate"?

They are telling you what they are doing and, as predicted, their opposition is willing to play along.

> Whether something qualifies or not will be a consensus in a given community, location, timeframe, etc.

I feel like this statement is pretty sophomoric.

> I feel like this statement is pretty sophomoric.

Come on, there's lots of examples for each. Location: fag (UK/US), timeframe: queer (reappropriation), community: see Kendrick Lamar / Delaney controversy.

I'm not saying it is wrong, I'm saying it's not adding value. Argue the point, don't make this a meta-discussion.

Why would that be odd? Most people encounter memes in the wild far removed from their point of origin. They have only the context in which it is used to interpret its meaning. Even if it had anti-semitic origins that doesn't mean it is used as such in the vast majority of instances any more than every use of Pepe or Groyper is.

It is precisely this sort of blackwhite thinking that cast serious doubts on the validity of the author's work and really just makes them look like someone with an axe to grind... or, to put it another way: *HONK HONK*

these aren't legitimate sources, you might as well link stormfront for proof that antifa drink the blood of infants. those articles are full of insane tenuous leaps of logic so far beyond anything rational.

It's used widely around the internet these days without any of that bullshit.

So it's not surprising people wouldn't associate it with racism, or know it may have at one time been linked.

> Among the list of hate words in the lexicon ... is 'antiwhite'. Why?

Because the context it's most often used in is racists claiming that someone is against white people when they defend other races. Just search for it on Twitter for lots of examples. (Not linking specific examples, they don't deserve the traffic) You'll commonly find it used together with whitegenocide, antisemitism and other stupidity.

"Applejuice" can be a hate word if those groups use it as a dogwhistle.

if you have a hard time understanding basic words, anti + white, you have been critically brainwashed.

  As the presence of hate words does not guarantee that the text is hateful, we utilize the Perspective API, a family of models used for detecting toxic content, to further filter our data

Yeah. Running a random list of words you don't like through a blackbox is some garbage-in garbage-out voodoo. It hardly matters what random words bots were able to generate on Twitter, what might matter is how many humans actually saw and interacted with any of it.

  The spike in March, 2022 coincides with the Canada convoy protests.

Proceeds to show literally the opposite. There is no measurable permanent spike of anything at all in their own graph!

These sort of "studies" will hurt the credibility of researches longer term.

I think you misread the chart?

> While baseline tweets remain stable throughout the year (with an exception in early 2022 coinciding with the Canada convoy protests (Soucy 2022)), hateful tweets increase dramatically following Musk’s takeover.

So the claim is that total tweets increase in early 2022. Total tweets in Figure 2 is the top orange line. There's a noticable spike approximately in April and another one around August. (That's going by my faulty eyes, so their claim that it's in March makes sense to me.)

Was that caused by the trucker protests? No idea. But there are lots of interesting looking spikes in this chart.

I think the chart is either extremely poorly made or intentionally misleading?

> There's a noticable spike approximately in April and another one around August

> Was that caused by the trucker protests? No idea. But there are lots of interesting looking spikes in this chart.

Precisely. They simply marked two occasions they don't like. Might as well correlate with mercury being in retrograde.

What is the baseline? The mean? The year over year? Look at the numbers about 100+-50 "bad" tweets on a given month.. this isn't a serious effort, I am embarrassed on their behalf.

I think you're misunderstanding the claim about the trucker convoy. They just said more people started tweeting around then.

The chart seems reasonably clear to me.

They define baseline pretty clearly.

> To ensure fluctuations in hate speech are not reflective of fluctuations in overall user activity, we also sample a base- line set of tweets collected during the same time intervals. We used the keyword “thing,” taken from a set of the most commonly used words (Geoffrey Leech 2001).

> I think you're misunderstanding the claim about the trucker convoy. They just said more people started tweeting around then.

OK. Why? A lot of things happened around then. Why mention the trucker convoy specifically?

> They define baseline pretty clearly.

How would a chart look like zoomed out to multiple years?

> OK. Why? A lot of things happened around then. Why mention the trucker convoy specifically?

Presumably they believed it was the correct explanation for the anomaly in the chart?

> How would a chart look like zoomed out to multiple years?

That's an interesting question but it isn't the one this paper is written about, which is a specific event.

May I ask if you're seeking to understand this paper or to criticize it? Because it kinda feels like when your objections were addressed you came up with some more of them?

> Presumably they believed it was the correct explanation for the anomaly in the chart?

On what basis? How is it not an arbitrary event? There is absolutely nothing else in the paper about this event.

> May I ask if you're seeking to understand this paper or to criticize it? Because it kinda feels like when your objections were addressed you came up with some more of them?

Is that not what you're supposed to do with papers? Is this a study or marching orders?

It's not about the trucker convoy, no.

It's not "marching orders", certainly. But reading to find how you might dismiss it is different from reading it critically. Like, it just strains my ability to believe you're reading the paper in good faith when you imply they haven't defined the term baseline, when it's simple to find the definition just by searching.

> But reading to find how you might dismiss it is different from reading it critically.

How so?

You're free to believe whatever you wish about me, only the actual issues raised are what matters, not the person raising them.

> It's not about the trucker convoy, no.

This is far more important than whether or not I personally rub you the wrong way. It means the paper is not legitimate.

> when it's simple to find the definition just by searching

I didn't just search, I actually read it. Stare at the paragraph again:

> Figure 2: Overall hate speech on Twitter increased after Elon Musk bought the platform. Number of hateful tweets sam- pled during each week in 2022, compared to a baseline of tweets collected during the same time period. The spike in March, 2022 coincides with the Canada convoy protests.

Look at the chart and this description and tell me you don't understand the problem here.

The difference is that if you make up your mind about the paper before you've even read it, a.) You've written a self fulfilling prophecy, b.) Your criticism will be shallow, and c.) You're not going to understand the paper.

The problem isn't that I have any animus towards you (which I don't). Frankly the problem is that you're misrepresenting what's in the paper. If you say you've read it, you shouldn't be saying it's misleading and justifying that by things that are trivially checked by searching.

I'm doing my best to presume good faith and to presume that you weren't doing this intentionally. But you're not really giving me a lot to work with in that regard.

I've explained quite clearly why I think it is misleading without misrepresenting anything. Some of my points you've conceded others you've decided to ignore and make it about me.

If you read it as well and deem this paper of good quality I suppose we can just agree to disagree and move on what can I say. I believe in following the truth wherever it may lead not fitting data to politically motivated conclusions which this work is very clearly doing, sad state of affairs.

I share this value of pursuing the truth without favor or prejudice; I think you should consider whether that was really what you went about doing. When I read your responses here, I honestly do get the impression you read this document with an agenda. When I pushed back on that, it didn't really seem like you denied it as much as justified it. That's not a problem for me, I do my best not to be invested in the opinions of others, but from what you're saying, maybe it should be a problem for you.

Best of luck, stranger. See you around.

Sorry you got that impression, that is between you and yourself as it were. I don't have anything to justify, as once again, my one and only agenda is as you say pursuing the truth without favor or prejudice.

It does not matter to me in which direction the paper is politically slanted one iota, or what conclusions it so desperately seeks. The ends don't justify the means, sorry.

It matters very much to me that it isn't anything like science, and worse, that it masquerades. You can dance around this all you want.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I am familiar with the guidelines and the intended spirit of the site and am totally on board.

Are you referring to something I posted in this thread as unsubstantive and flamebaity?

To be clear, nothing I wrote here was written intended as such.

"You can dance around this all you want." was a flamebait swipe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35563582 was unsubstantive flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568205 was flamebait ("So... Schizophrenia?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567227 was particularly bad ("What on earth are you talking about?", "Have you been watching the dictator drunk again?", etc.)

You've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534129).